Many methods, devices and systems previously have been developed to assist teaching children and non-English speakers how to read English. Examples include reading games, building blocks with letters on each face, phonics flashcards with and without pictures, words on magnets, easy-reader books with words in large font and with words associated with pictures, as well as many mechanical and various audio-visual aids.
Previously, authors of materials for teaching the first steps of reading have made efforts to present simple words that young children are better able to understand and to pronounce themselves. As well, many young adult and adult students of English who are encountering the language for the first time can benefit from instructional materials that are designed for learning the language in distinct approaches and along certain pathways of simple to more complex.
Phonics instruction in the English language teaches children or newcomers to the language the relationships between the letters (graphemes) of written language and the individual sounds (phonemes) of spoken language. It teaches using these relationships to read and write words. Teachers of reading and publishers of programs of beginning reading instruction sometimes use different labels to describe the grapheme-phoneme relationships, such as letter-sound associations; letter-sound correspondences; sound-symbol correspondences; and/or sound-spellings. Regardless of the label, the goal of phonics instruction is to help the beginning student to learn and use the alphabetic principle—the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds. Knowing these relationships helps the student to recognize familiar words accurately and automatically, and “decode” new words. Knowledge of the alphabetic principle contributes greatly to children's ability to read words both in isolation and in connected text.
An effective program of phonics instruction helps the teacher explicitly and systematically instruct students in how to relate letters and sounds, how to break spoken words into sounds, and how to blend sounds to form words; helps students understand why they are learning the relationships between letters and sounds; helps students apply their knowledge of phonics as they read words, sentences, and text; helps students apply what they learn about sounds and letters to their own writing; can be adapted to the needs of individual students, based on assessment; and includes alphabetic knowledge, phonemic awareness, vocabulary development, and the reading of text, as well as systematic phonics instruction.
“Phonemic awareness” is the ability to notice, hear, identify, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. Phonemic awareness is important because it improves children's word and reading comprehension, it helps children learn to spell. Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of speech sounds, or phonemes.
“Phonemes” are the smallest parts of sound in a spoken word that make a difference in the word's meaning. For example, changing the first phoneme in the word hat from /h/ to /p/ changes the word from “hat” to “pat,” and so changes the meaning (a letter between slash marks indicates herein the phoneme, or sound, that the letter represents, and not the name of the letter—for example, the letter h represents the sound /h/). English has about 41 phonemes. A few words, such as “a” or “oh,” have only one phoneme. Most words, however, have more than one phoneme: for example, “if” has two phonemes (/i/ /f/), check has three phonemes (/ch/ /e/ /k/), and stop has four phonemes (/s/ /t/ /o/ /p/). One phoneme can be represented by more than one letter.
A “grapheme” is the smallest part of written language that represents a phoneme in the spelling of a word. A grapheme may be just one letter, such as b, d, f, p, s; or several letters, such as ch, sh, th, -ck, ea, -igh.
Students show phonemic awareness in several ways, including: recognizing words in a set of words that begin with the same sound (e.g., BAT, BAG, and BOY all have /B/ at the beginning); isolating and saying the first or last sound in a word (e.g., the beginning sound of DOG is /D/, and the ending sound of SIT is /T/); combining, or blending the separate sounds in a word to say the word (“/P/, /A/, /T/ —PAT”); and/or segmenting a word into its separate sounds (“CUP—/C/, /U/, /P/”).
Instruction in phonics can include many different aspects of improving phoneme awareness, including: phoneme isolation (recognizing individual sounds in a word); phoneme identity (recognizing the same sounds in different words); phoneme categorization (recognizing the word in a set of three or four words that has a different sound; phoneme blending (from a sequence of separately spoken phonemes, combining the phonemes to form a word, then reading the word); phoneme segmentation (breaking a word into its separate sounds, then read the word); phoneme deletion (recognizing a word that remains when a phoneme is removed from another word); phoneme addition (making a new word by adding a phoneme to an existing word). phoneme substitution (substituting one phoneme for another to make a new word).
Importantly, although English spellings are irregular and phonics instruction can only take a student so far in learning the language, early phonics instruction teaches the student a system for remembering how to read English words. The memory of this principle helps them to read, spell, and recognize words more quickly and more accurately, with the process carrying over to all irregularly spelled words, where most of these words contain some regular letter-sound relationships that can help the student remember how to read them.
It has been shown that systematic and explicit phonics instruction improves a student's growth in reading [See: Bonnie B. Armbruster, B. B., and F. Lehr, “Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read; Kindergarten Through Grade 3; Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA); National Institute for Literacy (NIFL); edited by C. R. Adler, RMC Corporation; 2006; http://www.nifl.gov/nifl/publications.html; herein incorporated by reference].
Systematic phonics instruction helps students learn to identify word and increases their ability to comprehend what they read. Reading words accurately and automatically enables students to focus on the meaning of text. Research shows that phonics instruction contributes to comprehension skills. Sight-word programs begin by teaching students a sight-word reading vocabulary of fewer than 100 words. After they learn to read these words students receive instruction in the alphabetic principle.
A popular and effective teaching method and system for English phonics for beginning students of English language is the flashcard. Many versions of such cards have been designed and used. Numerous companies sell sets of flashcards, many of which contain four-letter words and multiple compound consonants.
However, a weakness exists in previous methods, devices and systems for teaching beginning students of English phonetics, most notably in the common and popular flashcard sets used for teaching children: these methods and materials have not been designed suitably to avoid confusion for instructing the beginning students of English at their very first stages of seeing, recognizing and reading words.
Phonemic awareness instruction is most effective when children are taught to manipulate phonemes by using the letters of the alphabet and when instruction focuses on only one or two rather than several types of phoneme manipulation. Adding phonics workbooks or phonics activities to these programs of instruction can confuse rather than help students to read English.
Particularly for very young children, instructional reading materials, including phonics flashcards, have presented too much variation in many aspects of alphabet letters and words, such as, for example, mixing of capital letters and small letters, choosing of words that have little understandable relevance to very young children, presenting words with distracting pictures and methods, presenting words with confusing fonts, presenting words with long and short vowel sounds, and presenting words with too much variety of structures in the form of vowel-consonant (VC), consonant-vowel (CV), consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC), vowel-consonant-consonant (VCC), consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant (CVCC), consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (CVCV), or multiple combinations thereof in words having multiple syllables.
Presenting sets of words to very early and/or young students of English is confusing and inefficient for learning when these word sets have mixtures of long vowel sounds and short vowel sounds, when words are used that are variably one, two, three, four, five, or more letters long, when the words have more than one syllable, and when the words are conceptually advanced or unfamiliar in relation to objects or ideas that are more comfortable and/or familiar to the very young mind, and/or when too many words are included in the instructional set.
The failings in prior instructional materials confuse and fatigue the beginning reader, and they distract the student substantially from focusing on quickly learning the sounds of the English consonants, such as, for example, initially learning the short vowel sounds and reading first, simple words.
Therefore, there is need for an improved instructional reading method, instructional system and instructional reading materials for teaching beginning students of English in their very first reading steps.